Gmail was blocked in China, cutting off a significant number of Gmail web addresses. China-based GreatFire.org, a group that advocates freedom of speech, suggested that it was the Great Firewall that should be blamed for the disruption of the service on Dec. 26 through Dec. 29.
A number of reports about the issue appeared on social media such as Twitter and Reddit. It was later on confirmed by Dyn Research, an Internet analysis firm.
"China has a number of ways they can block content," said VP of data analytics Earl Zmijewski of Dyn Research. "One of the crudest ways is to just block an IP address, and when you do that, you block all the content available at the IP."
Google has its own Transparency Report that displays traffic to Google services in real time. According to the report, Gmail traffic from China had a sharp drop-off in traffic on Friday.
"We've checked and there's nothing wrong on our end," a Google spokesman based in Singapore said in an email.
Since June, Google's services in China have been mostly disrupted, occurring in the light of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests on June 4. Until last week, accessing Gmail was done using protocols such as POP3, SMTP and IMAP. Through these, people were able to communicate using Gmail by using apps such as Microsoft Outlook and Apple iPhone's Mail.
"If we can't access Google, that's fine," said one user. "But not letting us even open Gmail, what's that about? Can't even read emails, what the heck is this!"
It's no secret that China has a long history of disrupting and censoring sites, the nation's way of cutting any signs of dissent or challenges to the currently ruling Communist Party.
Even Facebook and Twitter have been blocked. In 2010, Google partially pulled out from China, instead of performing self-censorship on its own search engine. Since then, the company has been redirecting the users to its Hong Kong site when they needed to visit its Chinese search site.
Dyn Research has confirmed that all the Hong Kong IP addresses that Gmail is routed through have been blocked.
"DNS returns only Hong Kong IPs from all of our locations throughout China," said Zmijewski. "These IP addresses are then blocked on backbone routers, so the Hong Kong servers cannot be reached from the mainland."
Now, the only way to view one's Gmail in China is by going through a virtual private network (VPN).
"Using a VPN seems to be the only answer to doing anything these days online in China," said Zach Smith, digital products manager at City Weekend magazine based in Beijing.
